4 Studies in Forestry [CHAP. i. 



a!! the German forests may be assessed at about 1,000,000,000 

 sterling' 



Professor Weber also states ' that, in addition to 4,150,000 

 annually spent in the management, reproduction, and protec- 

 tion of the forests, and in the felling, preparing, and handling of 

 the produce before it is delivered into the hands of the buyer, 

 the timber and other produce of the woodlands directly affords 

 employment to 583,000 persons, or 9 % of all the industrial 

 classes throughout the empire, who are engaged in industries 

 dependent on the forests for the raw material requisite for 

 their various trades. These 583,000 bread-winners probably 

 represent about 3,000,000 of the population. And in addition 

 thereto, there must also be taken into account the enormous 

 sums whose outlay is necessitated for transport by land and water 

 after the raw produce has come into the hands of the buyer. 



It therefore follows that, if our woodlands were as economi- 

 cally and as well managed as the German forests, they would 

 annually yield very nearly 2,000,000, and have a capital value 

 of 90,000,000, adopting 2 % as the rate of interest yielded, or 

 at any rate about 50,000,000, even adopting only twenty-five 

 years' purchase as their value, and presuming that they yielded 

 as much as 4 % per annum on their capital value of soil plus 

 growing-stock. 



Our woodland tracts are by no means equally distributed 

 over the length and breadth of the land ; for, as Major Craigie 

 reports in the Board of Agriculture's Returns for 1891 

 (page x.) : 



' The county of Hants now stands in the Returns as possessing the 

 largest area of woodland in England, or 122,574 acres. Sussex, with 

 122,073. comes second, while it may be worth noting that the four counties 

 of Hants, Sussex, Surrey, and Kent, forming the south-eastern corner of 

 England, possess between them nearly a fourth of the English woods and 

 plantations, showing over n % of their surface thus occupied, in contrast 

 with 4 % as the mean of the rest of the country. 



1 Die Atifgaben der Forstwirthschaft in Lorey's Handbuch der Forst- 

 wissenscha/t, 1886, vol. i. p. 85. 



